Former US Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin on Tuesday predicted an economic boom in the next 18 months as countries recover from the global economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The economic boom for the next 18 months is going to be extraordinary,” he told Jerusalem Report editor-in-chief Steve Linde at the Jerusalem Post Conference in Jerusalem.
“I do worry about inflation in the US and inflation around the world,” he added. “Obviously, we will have to normalize interest rates, but there has been tremendous business innovation; it has been one of the few good things that has come out of COVID.”
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Mnuchin reflected on the extraordinary experience of sitting at the head of the US Treasury during the start of the COVID-19 crisis.
“Anyone who has ever run a business never contemplated that the downside was zero revenues,” he said.
Mnuchin recalled how the US had spent close to $4 trillion to help the economy. In so doing, the former Trump administration in which he served had prevented a global depression, he said.
Mnuchin also reflected on the Abraham Accords brokered by former US president Donald Trump, under whose auspices Israel normalized ties with four Muslim countries: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
Economic partnership was an important basis for those agreements, he said, adding that he hopes Saudi Arabia will join the accords.
Mnuchin said the accords came out of a relationship the Trump administration had with countries in the region.
“My specific component of the relationship was fighting terror activities,” he said. “We created a terrorist-financing targeting center in the region that many of the Gulf countries participated in,” Mnuchin said.
“Every time I came to the Middle East, I came to Israel,” Mnuchin said. “There is no better partner to the US than Israel in helping us combat terror activities around the world.”